Bihar Teachers Boycott Lunch Duty

Schoolchildren received a free meal at a school in the state of Bihar, July 18.

A federation of elementary school teachers in the Indian state of Bihar said it has called for a boycott of the government’s midday meal program because it involves carrying out duties unrelated to teaching.

Dinesh Singh, secretary of the Bihar State Primary Teachers Federation, Thursday said nearly 300,000 teachers at elementary schools won’t taste food or supervise preparation and serving of meals, roles they are required to do by the state government.

Advertisement

The lunch program has come under scrutiny since 23 schoolchildren in Bihar died after eating a meal that was contaminated with pesticide. Police arrested the school headmistress Wednesday evening and she is being questioned. Investigators don’t know how the pesticide got into the food. The headmistress hasn’t been charged.

“Every other day there are reports of lizards or cockroaches being found in meals served to children, but unfortunately it’s we teachers who face public anger despite the fact that the program is being run by the state government,” Mr. Singh said.

He said the Bihar State Primary Teachers Federation wants the state government to appoint an agency to oversee the midday meal program so that teachers aren’t distracted from their main job. He added that teachers also are asked to conduct other non-academic work, such as administering iron supplements to children and helping to oversee the voting process in elections, be they local, statewide or national.

R. Lakshamanan, head of the school-lunch program in Bihar, said the state government has asked district officials to ensure the school lunch program continues.

“They should look at things in a holistic way,” Mr. Lakshamanan said of the teachers. “It isn’t practically possible to have huge infrastructure and human resources to handle things separately… Sparing two minutes to taste a spoon of food isn’t that time-consuming,” he said.

He added that the figure of 300,000 boycotting teachers appears exaggerated. “Only a fraction of the teachers union has called the boycott,” he said.

There are 400,000 registered elementary school teachers in Bihar, according to Mr. Singh’s group. He said the boycott started Thursday.

Its impact wasn’t immediately clear.

Brijnandan Sharma, the president of the Bihar State Primary Teachers Federation, said lunches hadn’t been served at schools across the state. But Ajay Kumar Chaudhary, director of primary education in the state, said the boycott hasn’t had an effect.

“Meals are being served normally. But we will have to see how things go ahead,” Mr. Chaudhary said.

Sanjay Rai, a teacher at Ahiyapur Middle School in Gaya district, about 75 miles south of the state capital Patna and 140 miles from the village where the July 16 poisoning took place, said lunch was served at his school Thursday.

“We had already bought vegetables so there wasn’t any point in wasting them. What will happen from tomorrow, we don’t know,” he said.

Bihar’s education minister, P.K. Shahi, last week acknowledged there were difficulties in providing free lunches to around 73,000 schools in the state. “I admit candidly that it’s impossible to serve hot, good quality food with the present infrastructure set up in Bihar,” he told The Wall Street Journal.

“It’s a big challenge to make the midday meal scheme foolproof… it is of such a big scale that we don’t have enough resources to handle it,” he said.

Two dozen children from the school where the poisoning occurred remain under observation at the Patna Medical College and Hospital. The medical superintendent there last week said they would be discharged from Monday, but a senior pediatrician Thursday said they would be kept there for at least four more days.

“Five of them are still showing signs of poison, while the rest are on drugs. We want to make sure that none of them return with any symptoms after we discharge them,” the pediatrician, Nigam Prakash Narain, said.

About India Real Time

India Real Time offers analysis and insights into the broad range of developments in business, markets, the economy, politics, culture, sports, and entertainment that take place every single day in the world’s largest democracy. Regular posts from Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires reporters around the country provide a unique take on the main stories in the news, shed light on what else mattered and why, and give global readers a snapshot of what Indians have been talking about all week. You can contact the editors at indiarealtime(at)wsj(dot)com.